BOBBEE BEE: STRUGGLE AGAINST FAKE NEWS

by Danny Haiphong

The Mueller Report’s conclusion cannot reverse the damage that has been done to left journalism and activism by the fake news witch hunt.

Fake news is the creature of a desperate ruling class that no longer has any tolerance for truth. Ever since Trump was used as a “Pied Piper” to aid Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign effort, the Democratic Party and its allies in the corporate media and U.S. intelligence apparatus have lamented the dangers of “fake news” in an effort rid the internet of any deviations from their official narrative. The story goes that Russia helped Trump win the White House by giving WikiLeaks incriminating DNC emails which irreparably harmed the Clinton campaign. And just as WikiLeaks and Russia have been criminalized by lies that implicate them in colluding to tell the truth, we writers and journalists on the left have been criminalized as “dupes” of Russia. The Mueller Report’s conclusion that the Trump-Russia story was a farce from the beginning cannot reverse the damage that has been done to left journalism and activism by the fake news witch hunt.

Left journalists and activists were first targeted by a shady online organization called Washington Postshortly after the November 2016 election. This anonymous website labeled Black Agenda Report and other left websites as agents of the Kremlin. The U.S. intelligence apparatus released report after report that blamed Russia Today (RT) and Russian media generally for creating divisions in the U.S., mainly through their coverage of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests. So-called “Alt-right forces” were equated with so-called “Alt-left forces”—a euphemism for left of the Democratic Party. RT, Sputnik, and others were then forced to register as agents of a foreign government. Social media and Silicon Valley monopolies changed their algorithms to suppress any content that challenged the many myths of American exceptionalism.  The NATO-owned Atlantic Council and neocon-sponsored NewsGuard corporation got in on the mix and is working to ensure that the war on “fake news” eventually reaches every single channel of electronic communication possible, including the software of the computers that we purchase.“

PropOrNot,” which was covered by the CIA and Jeff Bezos’

Black Agenda Report has felt the consequences of the U.S. Empire’s so-called war on “fake news.” So have outlets that express solidarity with Venezuela such as Telesur and Venezuelanalysis.Each have repeatedly seen their Facebook and social media accounts removed. Over 2,000 social media accounts sympathetic to Venezuela’s Bolivarian government were removed in February. Our struggle against “fake news” is thus international in scope and fundamentally different than the one being waged by our enemies in the ruling elite. 

This struggle must answer the calls to action being sounded by the most urgent questions of our period. The U.S. establishment has identified the struggle to defend the self-determination of peoples and nations around the world as the most dangerous question of all. Venezuela has been subject to ruthless bipartisan lies to vilify the Bolivarian project. Washington and its corporate media servants have portrayed the Venezuelan people as starved subjects of a ruthless Third World dictator who wields absolute power over them. We have heard this before. When Republican Senator Marco Rubio jovially posted on Twitter an image of the maimed corpse of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, he revealed the main objective of the U.S. for Venezuela: to overthrow its democratically-elected government in the same manner as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless other nations which have been subject to U.S. imperial terrorism. When we discuss Venezuela, our first call to action is to unearth the lies that give ideological cover to the war mongers in the White House and corporate media.